Book Review: Lauren Kate’s "Fallen"

The recipe for Lauren Kate’s newest release, “Fallen” is delicious. Other writer’s should be able to recreate it in their own kitchens (because that’s where I do all my writing) with gourmet results. Simply take:
1 C. City of Angels (the Meg Ryan/Nicholas Cage movie, for anyone who forgot)
2 T. “Twilight”
A dash of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons
A couple of shakes of the Apocrypha

Mix well and you’ll end up with: A good girl who may have killed her love-interest is sentenced to a reform school. Everybody has the hots for sublimely gorgeous bad boys, and the main character, seventeen-year-old Lucinda Price, gets to choose between two. Will it be the good boy who treats her badly or the bad boy who treats her well? Either way, both male characters are shrouded in mystery and she’s unable to deny her attraction to them.

“Fallen” was an easy read. I blew threw the 452 page YA paranormal romance in less than four hours.

On a scale of one to five, I give it three-and-a-half stars. Why the imperfect rating even though I’d recommend it to my friends? It seemed like the author’s voice slipped in a few places. There were sections narrated in a snappy teenage voice abruptly interrupted by some Victorian-area vocabulary. Although if you read the book, you can see how those insertions may apply.

I also had an issue with some wavering plot points. Was Lucinda originally sent to a fancy pants boarding school because it was near the facility in which she was receiving psychiatric treatment, or was it because she won a scholarship? Which is it? The reader doesn’t realize that Lucinda is an excellent student until 75 pages from the end.

And last but not least, you don’t get your questions answered and neither does the protagonist. I get the feeling that maybe Lauren Kate didn’t know how to answer the questions, so wrote herself an easy out. The good old, “If I tell you then I have to kill you,” just doesn’t do it for me.

I’m sure the author will have worked out the explanations (she’d better) in the second book, “Torment” which is due out this fall.

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